muscular christianity

The notion of Muscular Christianity was an important feature of some key
discourses around work with boys and men in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Here Clifford Putney explores the origin and use of the term.

Muscular
Christianity can be defined as a Christian commitment to health and manliness.
Its origins can be traced to the New Testament, which sanctions manly exertion
(Mark 11:15) and physical health (1 Cor. 6:19-20). But while muscular
Christianity has always been an element in Christianity, it has not always been
a major element. The early Church sometimes praised health and manliness, but
it was much more concerned with achieving salvation, and it preached that men
could achieve salvation without being healthy and husky. This doctrine
seemingly squared with the Gospels, and it reigned supreme within the Church for
centuries. It did inspire criticism, however, and that criticism was especially
fierce in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when droves of
Protestant ministers in England and America concluded that men were not truly
Christians unless they were muscular Christians.

The phrase "muscular Christianity" probably first appeared in an 1857 English
review of Charles Kingsley's novel Two Years Ago (1857). One year later, the
same phrase was used to describe Tom Brown's School Days, an 1856 novel
about life at Rugby by Kingsley's friend, fellow Englishman Thomas Hughes. Soon
the press in general was calling both writers muscular Christians and also
applying that label to the genre they inspired: adventure novels replete with
high principles and manly Christian heroes.

Hughes and Kingsley were not only novelists; they were also social critics.
In their view, asceticism and effeminacy had gravely weakened the Anglican
Church. To make that church a suitable handmaiden for British imperialism,
Hughes and Kingsley sought to equip it with rugged and manly qualities. They
also exported their campaign for more health and manliness in religion to
antebellum America, where their ideas failed to catch on immediately due to
factors such as Protestant opposition to sports and the popularity of feminine
iconography within the mainline Protestant churches.

Opposition to muscular Christianity in America never completely disappeared.
But it did weaken in the aftermath of the Civil War, when changes in American
society placed health and manliness uppermost in the minds of many male white
Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These men, who included Social Gospel leaders such as
Josiah Strong and politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, viewed factors such as
urbanization, sedentary office jobs, and non-Protestant immigration as threats
not only to their health and manhood but also to their privileged social
standing. To maintain that standing, they urged "old stock" Americans to
revitalize themselves by embracing a "strenuous life" replete with athleticism
and aggressive male behavior. They also called loudly upon their churches to
abandon the supposedly enervating tenets of "feminized" Protestantism.

As evidence that there existed a "woman peril" in American Protestant
churches, critics such as the pioneer psychologist G. Stanley Hall pointed to
the imbalance of women to men in the pews. They also contended that women's
influence in church had led to an overabundance of sentimental hymns, effeminate
clergymen and sickly-sweet images of Jesus. These things were repellant to
"real men" and boys, averred critics, who argued that males would avoid church
until "feminized" Protestantism gave way to muscular Christianity, a strenuous
religion for the strenuous life.

The heyday of muscular Christianity in America lasted roughly from 1880 to
1920. During that time, the YMCA invented basketball and volleyball, the Men
and Religion Forward Movement sought to fill Protestant churches with men, and
the churches took the lead in the organized camping and public playground
movements. These efforts to make muscular Christianity an integral part of the
churches lasted throughout World War I. But in the pacifistic 1920s, there
emerged widespread discontent with many of the ideals that had flourished during
World War I, including muscular Christianity. Protestant leaders such as Harry
Emerson Fosdick and Sherwood Eddy blamed muscular Christianity for encouraging
militarism. And satirists such as H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis skewered
muscular Christianity in their writings.

The postwar devaluation of muscular Christianity was evident not only in
literature but also in the mainline Protestant churches. By the 1930s, these
churches were gravitating toward the Neo-Orthodoxy of Reinhold Niebuhr, who
argued that divinity resided not in men's muscles, but with God. As
Neo-Orthodoxy arose in the mainline Protestant churches, muscular Christianity
declined there. It did not, however, disappear from the American landscape,
since it found some new sponsors. They include the Catholic Church and various
rightward leaning Protestant groups. The Catholic Church promotes muscular
Christianity in the athletic programs of schools such as Notre Dame, and the
evangelical Protestant groups that support muscular Christianity include Promise
Keepers, Athletes in Action, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.